An Inspector Calls — Characters and Themes

An Inspector Calls looks like a detective play and is actually a political argument. Priestley wrote it in a single week in 1945, as Britain went to the polls in the election that produced the welfare state, and every structural choice in it serves that argument.

Key Characters

Character	Significance
Inspector Goole	Mysterious figure who interrogates the family. Represents Priestley's socialist conscience.
Arthur Birling	Self-made capitalist; dismisses social responsibility. Represents the complacent upper class.
Sybil Birling	Coldest character; refuses responsibility. Represents class snobbery.
Sheila Birling	Begins selfish; ends morally awakened — represents hope for the younger generation.
Eric Birling	Alcoholic; responsible for Eva's pregnancy; ultimately accepts responsibility.
Eva Smith	Never appears; represents all working-class women exploited and failed by society.

The 1912 setting is the play's cleverest move

Priestley wrote in 1945 but set the play in 1912, and the gap does most of the work.

Arthur Birling opens by declaring the Titanic "absolutely unsinkable" and predicting there will be no war. A 1945 audience had lived through two world wars and knew the Titanic sank within weeks of the play's setting. Every confident pronouncement Birling makes is destroyed by history the audience has already witnessed.

This is dramatic irony deployed structurally rather than as a local effect. By the time the Inspector arrives, Priestley has already established that Birling's worldview is unreliable — so the audience is primed to reject his politics before they are argued against.

Goole: inspector, or something else

The play never explains him, and that ambiguity is deliberate. Read the name aloud.

The evidence that he is not a real policeman: he knows things he could not know, he controls the order of revelation absolutely, and the final phone call reveals no such inspector exists — yet a girl has just died. The evidence that it hardly matters: whether he is a ghost, a collective conscience or a device, his function is identical. He forces each character to confront what they did.

His final speech — the warning about "fire and blood and anguish" — reads as prophecy to an audience who had just endured exactly that.

Key Themes

• Social responsibility — "We are responsible for each other." The Inspector's core message.
• Class and inequality — the Birlings' wealth allows them to exploit the poor
• Gender — women have little power; Eva is vulnerable to men at every turn
• Generational change — the young accept responsibility; the old do not
• Time — written in 1945 but set in 1912; Priestley comments on failure to learn from WW1

The generational split is the play's hope

Priestley divides the family sharply, and the division is the argument.

Sheila and Eric change. Sheila recognises her own cruelty almost immediately and, crucially, begins to see through the Inspector's method before anyone else does. By the final act she has effectively taken over his moral role.

Arthur and Sybil do not. Their relief when they believe the Inspector was a hoax is the play's most damning moment — they learn nothing, and celebrate escaping consequences rather than regretting the harm.

The ending traps them precisely there. The telephone rings; a girl has died; an inspector is on his way. Priestley denies them the escape and denies the audience a comfortable resolution.

Eva Smith never appears

This is worth a paragraph in almost any essay. Eva has no lines, no stage presence and, arguably, no single identity — the family may each have harmed a different woman.

Her absence makes her representative. She is not a character to sympathise with individually so much as a stand-in for every working-class woman the Birlings' class could dispose of. Priestley keeps her offstage so she cannot be reduced to one person's misfortune.

Context

• Written 1945, set in 1912 — the gap is deliberate; Priestley contrasts the lessons of WW1
• J.B. Priestley was a socialist whose wartime radio broadcasts reached millions
• 1912: the year the Titanic sank — symbol of upper-class hubris
• Post-WW2 audiences were ready for change; the play supported the Labour welfare state message
• First performed in the Soviet Union in 1945, as no London theatre was available

Common mistakes

• Treating it as a whodunnit. Everyone is guilty; that is the point
• Summarising each confession in turn instead of arguing about the structure
• Ignoring the ending, which reverses everything the older Birlings believe they have escaped
• Writing about Eva as a character rather than as a representative device

Exam tips

• Write about Priestley's purpose — the play is an argument for collective responsibility
• Use the 1912/1945 gap in almost any question; it underpins the whole play
• Note stage directions: the lighting shifts from "pink and intimate" to "brighter and harder" when the Inspector arrives
• On Goole, argue the ambiguity is functional rather than trying to settle what he is

Key facts to remember

• Set in 1912, written in 1945 — dramatic irony is structural, not incidental
• Goole is deliberately unexplained; his function matters more than his nature
• The young change and the old do not — that split is Priestley's argument
• Eva never appears, which makes her representative rather than individual
• The cyclical ending denies the Birlings, and the audience, an escape